Last Week's Games: Fire Warrior, Hotline Miami, Shinobi 3, Golden Axe, Takenoko

I’ve missed the last few weeks of this! Sorry about that…

In the last few weeks, I’ve played and beaten a couple of games. One of them was Fire Warrior on the PC, and I’ve posted the review for it here. I have a few additional remarks to make here: Many of you will have noticed by now that I really enjoy games based in the Warhammer / Warhammer 40K universe. However, I rarely make the argument that they’re good games, and Fire Warrior is no exception. A lot of what eventually became first person shooters were being standardised during the period where Fire Warrior was released, and in many respects, the game fell short of the mark.

Wouldn't it be great to order one of
your squad-mates to cover you?

It is also worth remembering that the Tau were in their infancy in the 40K universe when this game was released, and with almost two decades under their belt, they have become quite a distinctive force in their own right, rather than the “new kids on the block,” so to speak. I don’t know how well they work in the most recent edition of Warhammer 40K, but certainly as far as 7^th edition, they relied on their squads working together more than almost any other army in the game. That got me thinking: What if a 40K game was made with Tau as the player characters, but instead of a standard FPS game, it became more of a squad-based game like SOCOM and Star Wars: Republic Commando? A rather odd comparison for me to make, since I’ve played neither, but I understand the general premise of those games and having an FPS game with a team of Fire Warriors with different abilities could be something very special indeed. Could it happen? Let’s hope so…

Get used to the game telling you you're dead
'cause you'll be seeing it a lot!

I also played Hotline Miami on the PC, getting to the end of it. I’ve got a review for that coming out on Friday, but I might as well tell you now, I really enjoyed the game. It takes a certain rhythm to get into it but once you have, you can have a lot of fun with the trial-and-error gameplay – as long as you don’t take it too seriously. There’s a lot to be said for being good at what you do. By the time I reached the end of the game, I was still having fun and wasn’t quite ready to get off my crazy horse quite yet, so I downloaded Hotline Miami 2 and I’m playing my way through that now.

These will go down in one hit if you
know what you're doing...

On the Xbox 360, I’ve been once again getting some enjoyment out of the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. I’ve often spoken about my fondness for Streets of Rage 2, but funnily enough I didn’t even touch that this time. I came back to my old sparring partner Shinobi 3, running, chopping and, er, shuriken-ing my way though the seven stages, and even though some of the platforming is frustratingly difficult, it is always a fun game to play. The furthest I managed was the final level on the flying airship, because as with many platforming games I died to falling off it more than anything else!

The platform sections of Golden Axe
were never great...

I also played Golden Axe with my daughter. This is one of the first games I ever played on the Megadrive, and some of you may remember I beat it several years ago. I had no intention to return to it, but I thought it was a simple-enough game to explain to Jessie, so we gave it a go! It went reasonably well until Jess forgot what button she had to press to continue the game when she died and locked herself out of the game. I managed to reach the end of the game but lost to the final boss.

Everyone loves cute pandas.

Finally, me and Kirsty played Takenoko – a board game where you must grow a garden and feed a hungry panda. Kirsty will play just about anything with cute animals in it, and she managed to win it this time by taking a lot of the panda-feeding cards and scoring points that way. It’s a great little game, about the right balance of luck and skill for us, and I’m sure we’ll come back to it again soon!

Backlog Beatdown: Setting Warriors on Fire with Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior

Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior was a game I owned many years ago on the PlayStation 2. I enjoyed it at the time, but I got to a certain point and got stuck, never played it again and then foolishly traded it in. When I saw it was available on GOG, I bought it and I have finally gotten around to beating it…

Near the start of the game in a typical
war-torn 40K battleground...

Fire Warrior is a first-person shooter set in the Warhammer 40000 universe, where you control the titular Fire Warrior – a Tau soldier of the Fire Caste. On your first active mission, you are aiming to rescue an Ethereal from an Imperial governor, but later you get caught up in a plot to unleash the forces of Chaos upon the unsuspecting galaxy once more. Throughout your journey, you engage in a ship battle, make uneasy alliances with the Space Marines, blow up a Titan and confront the forces of Chaos in their rawest form...

The muzzle flare from the Autogun takes up
more or less the whole field of view...

So, is Fire Warrior any good? Sort of. It was entertaining enough. But arguably the most interesting part of the game is comparing it to what was happening with First-Person Shooters at the time. Gaming was in its sixth generation of consoles, and with that came some smatterings of competence in 3D gaming after a wonky start on the previous generation. Controls for FPS games were on their way to being standardised, multiplayer functionality was creeping in (though it was far from usual for the PS2 in the UK, since broadband was only just starting to be used domestically,) and even the Sci-fi games were aiming for the more realistically proportioned arsenal of only two weapons at a time, rather than whatever you could carry. Leading the charge was Microsoft’s Halo: Combat Evolved, and many of the mechanics of that game were borrowed for Fire Warrior, including the limited weapons, and a personal shield that would protect you for a short while and recharge if you could avoid fire for a few seconds. In that respect, Fire Warrior was definitely chasing trends rather than setting them, but Kuju chose the right part of the 40K lore to make the game from – the Tau. At that point, the Tau were new to the 40K universe, having been released not even two years before, so there was no reason to suggest they could not use the shield, or pick up other weapons and use them if they so choose – they had a blank canvas to design the mechanics of the game. It looked like it could potentially be a contender to Microsoft’s sci-fi shooter.

It had multiplayer as well, but let's not pretend
that's worth talking about nearly two decades later...

Well, that didn’t happen, largely because Fire Warrior is nowhere near as good as Halo. The plot fit the 40K lore well enough but was of no surprise to anyone who had been following the universe for any length of time. The shooting was OK at best, but the Imperial Guard (as they were at the time) took far too many hits before going down, and the Space Marines and Chaos forces were brutally hard to deal with. The guns did what they were supposed to do, though with a surprising lack of punch from the Tau weapons, and the Bolter which handled more like a rocket launcher than anything else. The graphics were lacklustre, even for the time, though the sound was handled surprisingly well. And the level design, while functional for the most part, had some wild variations in checkpoint placement and areas of cheap deaths. Additionally, the version I played on PC was not without a few bugs.

With that having been said, I enjoyed the game. I’ve always enjoyed the 40K universe so I’m usually willing to give the flaws in any game that represents it a free pass. It’s short enough that it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the difficulty of the enemies can make for some truly thrilling battles in the right places. It’s an entertaining game to play, to experience the shooters of the time and their evolution into what we know now – but with Fire Warrior’s contemporaries outdistancing it, and many developments improving quality of life since then, I would struggle to recommend this to all but the most curious of 40K-based video game collectors.

Final Score: 2/5: If you're sure.

Last Week's Games: Baldur's Gate, Doom and Dark Void

 This week I’ve mainly been playing Baldur’s Gate on my laptop. I mentioned last week that I’m enjoying this game a lot more now that I’m in the frame of mind to go around the different areas grinding for Experience Points, but first impressions of the game are a little misleading in this respect, as there is really only one way you can go at the start of the game – the Nashkel Mines is the first major dungeon – and if you don’t go there reasonably quickly, certain party members leave you behind. I wouldn’t want to have to handle the first part of the game without Jaheira’s healing powers! Now that I’m well into the game, having cleared the Cloakwood mines – the second major dungeon – I’m touring round the Southern part of the world map, trying to tie up all my loose ends before I head to Baldur’s Gate itself.

Apparently he gets much
better later on...

The other thing to keep in mind was that while I was initially willing to allow some of my party members to die, I’m building a party around the six I have now that I’m happy with: The main character is a Paladin called Roisin, who I’ve given a two-weapon fighting style. Imoen, of course, is essential for her trap-finding skills and as her main weapon is her bow, she also serves as most of the party’s artillery. I picked up Branwen in Nashkel, and I held on to Jaheira as well – multiple healers in the party give it a little more longevity, especially in the later areas of the game where you need to cast several healing spells to heal a party member completely. Dynaheir is my wizard, and she is at her most useful when her area-of-effect spells flatten a combat encounter before it even starts. Finally, I have Rasaad, a monk who is new to the Enhanced edition of the game I have. He can do a decent amount of damage up close, but doesn’t seem to be able to take much himself – I had to use magic items[1] to bring his Armour Class down[2] to a reasonable level, and even then, he appears to get hit a lot and doesn’t have a particularly high hit dice.[3] Nonetheless, I’m happy with the party I’ve got now and I’ll hopefully see it through to the end!

I mean, I'm assuming this is an updated
version of the Revenant...

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Doom on the PS4. I’ve had this a while and I’ve just gotten around to playing it; I’m liking it so far! While the graphics and gameplay have obviously been enhanced by increasingly good technology since the 1993 originals I still play from time to time, the fast and frantic game play is still there and makes for some intense, thrilling battles. Hit-scan weapons are thankfully a thing of the past, but it’s a lot harder to dodge projectiles unless you’re really on it with your strafing! I’m not very far into the game yet, but it’s one I will come back to when I need a cathartic shooting spree. I don’t have a PlayStation Plus account though, so you’re unlikely ever to see me on Multiplayer.

Has the same 7th gen problem of having
unnerving eyes...

Finally, I downloaded and played Dark Void on Xbox Games with Gold on the Xbox 360. This is an interesting game that looks like it’s going to be a jetpack-based shoot-em-up, but then the main plot kicks in and it’s a 7^th-gen cover-based shooter with some jetpack elements added later. It’s based just before the World War II, where your plane crashes somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle and you find yourself under attack from strange metal beings called The Watchers. It’s alright; it’s tried to implement verticality into cover-based shooting which was a brave move, and I probably would have liked it a lot more were it not for the fact that I’ve just played through Uncharted 2. I’ve heard that Dark Void was something of a let-down in its potential, but I’ll try to beat it and see for myself!

---

[1] Monks can’t usually wear armour.

[2] Baldur’s Gate is based on the second edition of Dungeons and Dragons’ weird THACO – To Hit Armour Class Zero – system, and any enhancement to your armour class goes down rather than up.

[3] D8, I think.

Last Week's Games: Baldur's Gate, Uncharted 2 and Ultra Street Fighter 2

It’s been a while since my last mainline blog. Nothing happened that specifically made me stop, but there were a couple of times where I found myself wanting to play games more than write about them so that’s what I did. And I’ve built up a backlog of things to talk about as well; so big that talking about them all wasn’t the right approach. I could talk about how I’d beaten Crash Bandicoot 2 and Skyrim, but both of my reviews are available if you want to read about that. No, instead I’ll talk about the games I’ve been playing recently.

To try to manage the backlog of games, (fighting for a lost cause, I know, but I might as well try!) I find myself organising the kind of game I’m playing across different platforms. I might have an RPG on one system, a platformer/action game on another, a fighting game on another, and a strategy game on yet more. This works well; it can take a while to settle into the routine between beating games but once I do, I’m a lot more focussed.

Hopefully the map will be a lot more
full by the time I'm done.

For my long-form RPG I’ve come back to an old save file on Baldur’s Gate on my laptop. This is a game I’ve started and re-started many times over the years, and I’ve always enjoyed the first few hours before drifting off to another game. The game is not particularly well-balanced and unless you think to save in the middle of an area or dungeon, you can potentially lose anything up to an hour of play for having your protagonist or a favourite party member die. But I think what frustrates me most is that I always feel like the player character (A paladin, in this case!) and the party are always under-levelled for the mainline quest; I’ll go to deal with whatever I’m supposed to be dealing with and be destroyed within moments. There are also moments in the game where certain of the side quests and enemies are presented to you far sooner than you can deal with them. But this time around, I found myself thinking: “Hey, you’ve just beaten Skyrim. Whenever something was too difficult in Skyrim you’d go and clear another few dungeons to level up your abilities and get some more weapons! Just do that.” And then I knew where I was, and everything started to fall in to place. Hopefully this will keep me playing long enough to see it through to the end!

Chloe's a great character...

On the PS4 I’ve been playing Uncharted 2. This was my action-adventure game that, in a move typical of many 7^th-gen console games, are entertaining while they last but don’t take too long to beat. Some of you may remember that I played through the first Uncharted game the year before last; I enjoyed it at the time but felt that one play through was enough, and Uncharted 2 is shaping up to be much the same, with one exception: The story is much better. I’m all for keeping a tight focus on your plot, but having a well-performed cast of characters with conflicting interests and personalities, as well as having a betrayal and revenge saga alongside your quest for gold and glory, makes the game a lot more engaging. I’ve about three quarters of the way to the end at the time of writing and I’m hoping to beat it by the end of the month.

Zangief is much better in USF2, because
he has a special move that blocks projectiles
without losing ground.

And finally, on the Switch I’ve been enjoying Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers. This is always a nice game to play with Jessie, but I’ve been playing through the game on the hardest difficulty with as many of the characters as I can. So far I’ve managed to beat it with the original eight Street Fighter 2 characters, and I’m always pleased to see that the endings have been modified slightly from their 4^th-gen counterparts – it gives something new to those of us who have been playing Street Fighter 2 for years. I also find myself spamming medium jump kick more than I ever did before!

Hopefully by next week I’ll have finished Uncharted 2, and I’ll tell you about that. See you then!

Backlog Beatdown: Warring in the Stars with Star Wars: Starfighter

Recently, my daughter became interested in Star Wars to the point of watching all nine films in less than a week, and while I’ll happily concede that some of the films are better than others, I usually manage to find something to enjoy about them. Watching bits of Episode 1 back certainly piqued my interest enough to try out Star Wars: Starfighter, a game I’d picked up as part of a Humble Bundle purchase but hadn’t yet played…

Canyon runs need precision...

For a game that was released to fill a large space in the market for video games based on Star Wars while the prequel trilogy was in full swing, Starfighter seems to have its mindset firmly rooted in combining the game – a light fighter simulator – with what Star Wars is at its core: A character-driven story. You play as a Naboo Starfighter pilot called Rhys, a mercenary pilot called Vana and a pirate called Nym at various stages of the campaign, which tells a story of a run-up to the events of the Invasion of Naboo from the Trade Federation. Together with a non-playable mechanic called Reti, they are attacked, betrayed and otherwise set against the Trade Federation, and launch a guerrilla campaign against them in their fighters and bombers.

The inevitable comparisons to X-Wing and TIE Fighter come to mind but I found Starfighter to be a welcome break from that kind of simulation-style gameplay. Your guns either never run out of ammo or recharge, your shields recharge over time but there’s no faffing about re-distributing power, and your speed is managed through a simple speed up / slow down command. All the fighters handle the same but are played slightly differently depending on their armament; Rhys flies a standard N-1 Starfighter which is good for dogfighting, Vana pilots a Guardian Mantis that is good for disabling shields, and Nym pilots his Havoc which is primarily used for bombing runs. There are thirteen missions in the campaign, each one its own set of rules and objectives that must be completed to proceed, with additional objectives available to achieve if you wish.

The last mission takes place during the 
Battle for Naboo...

Starfighter is a good game, but you must be in the right frame of mind for it. The levels are varied and well-designed, and you’ll get past the first of them without trying, after which you’ll face a large difficulty spike where the objectives and threats leave more room for failure. And I can guarantee you’ll find fifty different things to hate about the game when you fail a mission over and over again – but when you finally work out what to do and manage a perfect run, you’ll feel a grin of excitement spread across your face as the Mission Complete screen comes up. Rarely have more modern games made me feel so good about beating a level! The last missions are absolute beauties, requiring knowledge of what’s coming and when, and managing your speed.

A quick note on graphics and sound: Apart from the Star Wars soundtrack which is always excellent, this game was released in 2001 and its assets are showing their age. The fighters and droid vehicles are functional enough, but even for the time, those character models were hideous, and the voice acting sounds cheesy even for a Star Wars game. It didn’t affect my enjoyment, just don’t expect it to be easy on the eye!

Nym's bombs take some getting used to,
but are a lot of fun!

Star Wars games often run into the problem of the stakes being relatively low. Either they’re following the mainline plot of the films, in which case you’re re-telling a story already told, or they’re spun off from the films, in which case you don’t feel like you’re affecting the plot to any great extent because you know how it all works out. Starfighter is in the latter category. I don’t want to spoil the plot in the review so I won’t say if I was right – but I will say I wasn’t giving the game enough credit. I’ve described what I mean in the main blog so have a look at that if you’re interested.

I’d caution against spending any substantial amount of money on Starfighter, but if you can find it cheaply enough, it’s well worth your time.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Star Wars: Starfighter

Owing to my daughter’s newfound interest in Star Wars, I found myself playing a game I’d had for a while but never gotten around to playing: Star Wars Starfighter. I beat it as well, and the review for it is coming out on Friday. I’ve said most of what I want to say about the game there, but here I’d like to develop a point I made about the plot of Starfighter. Spoilers ahead, for whatever it’s worth!

Holding back the invading droids
was a huge amount of fun.

One problem that most Star Wars games run into is that they can’t really tell their own story without reducing the stakes. Most of the so-called Extended Universe has been declared Non-Canon now, presumably because Disney didn’t want to have to ret-con anything while they were making the new films, so that doesn’t help, but they still struggle either way. Of the games that are available, either they follow the mainline plot of the films, in which case they’re re-telling a story already told, or they’re spun off from the mainline plot, in which case you never really get the sense that you’re affecting anything major since the key points of the Star Wars saga happened in a story you’re not involved in.

Starfighter was always going to run into this issue, but it never loses sight of what Star Wars is at its core – a character-driven story adventure. It handles it quite well: The plot is set during the run-up to the Battle of Naboo in The Phantom Menace. Through their own activities as fighters, mercenaries and pirates, the four pilots discover a droid production facility on one of the planets and must work together in order to blow up the facility. The threat is established by showing the duplicitous nature of the Trade Federation to two of the characters in the early game, and resolved by having them participate in at least some of the battle of Naboo in the later game – you really do get a sense of how worse it could have been for Naboo had the Droid army been at full strength, which if your characters hadn’t been involved, it would have been.

Flying around a hangar is
always a bit fiddly...

Where Starfighter lets us down plot-wise is in the final boss. The fight itself is fine and takes a lot of the skills you’ve been building throughout the game, if a little annoying when you don’t know exactly where it’s going. But the problem with any battle fought in the Separatist portion of the saga is that as your opponents are always droids, they lack the necessary levels of humanity influence the plot themselves. Starfighter tries to get around this by having the Trade Federation employ mercenaries to interfere with negotiations at the start of the game when you’re escorting Queen Amidala, Rhys’ mentor is killed by one of them and he turns up at the end as the final boss having not participated in the story at any point in between. First, it doesn’t make sense for the Trade Federation to have attacked Queen Amidala before she signed their treaty, and second, it very much felt like a final boss for the sake of having a final boss.

None of which spoils the experience of the game, you understand. It’s still a fun space shooter that I was happy to play, and it made a refreshing change for me to play a game I can wrap up in a few days rather than several months! But it did make me think about the reasons that the plot of most Star Wars video games is often its weakest point and realise that we can be thankful for those games that counter it with some very solid gameplay.

As an aside, the exception here – and probably why this game is so fondly remembered – is Knights of the Old Republic. This was set far enough away from the plot of the Skywalker saga that the galaxy would have had time to sort itself out whichever way it went, but also Bioware had a very talented writing team at the top of their game telling a fun story with twists, stakes and bitter struggles that many still hold as the standard of RPG storytelling to this day.

 

Backlog Beatdown: Assaulting Aliens with Super Mutant Alien Assault

I can’t quite remember when or why I made the decision to buy Super Mutant Alien Assault; most likely from the release sections of one of the Co-Optional Podcasts. I do remember the art style having a 2D “SNES” feel to it, and that would have engaged me as much as anything else. However, it was a long time between buying the game and playing it…

Super Mutant Alien Assault is an arena / roguelike game released in 2015.The premise is that aliens have taken over some space ships in three different galaxies, and you play as a security robot tasked with eliminating the aliens and saving the human race, or something along those lines. Let’s be honest, you don’t usually play games like this for the plot!

One of the boss battles...

The game is a fast and frantic platform shooter, with the roguelike elements linked mainly to progression – extra starting items unlock the more you play through the game. There are three galaxies and four levels per galaxy; each galaxy ends with a random boss battle and the other three levels are randomly generated as well. You must take on hordes of irradiated aliens, killing them quickly before they mutate into their upgraded forms, whilst completing the level objectives to move on, beating the boss on each level, until you clear the game on one run. No easy task!

A lot of frantic action is sometimes
hard to keep track of!

You start off without weapons, but can pick up a primary weapon on most levels – these start off with the fairly standard shotgun, uzi and rocket launcher, but later go on to include laser guns, plasma cannons, a handheld weapon of concentrated light that is definitely not a lightsaber, and even a chakram that holds exploding bombs. You also have secondary weapons – pistols, chackrams and a burst assault rifle. There are explosive weapons as well, ranging from grenades to trip mines to entire bomb packs. And finally, you have some special abilities as well – higher jumps, faster movement, plasma blasts. Play the game for long enough and you’ll find a combination of weapons and upgrade items that you like, but the game randomises the equipment drops so there’s no guarantee you’ll get the one you’re looking for – you get what you’re given, and it’s up to you to make it work.

Super Mutant Alien Assault works very well; the game has tight and responsive controls, challenges you at the right level and the levels are quick enough for an engaging experience that don’t require too much of a time investment. Killing aliens is always fun, but additional objectives in the missions, plus the game not always giving you access to certain kinds of weapons, and only allowing you to heal once per galaxy, lend a strategic element to the game that requires strategic thinking and forward planning. The graphics are nothing special, but they don’t need to be; they’re top end of 5^th generation 2D graphics and will still look as good in 20 years. The sound is good as well; the sound effects are marvellous, and the backing music is made up of dubstep tracks which are just old enough in 2021 to provoke a feeling of nostalgia.

In these levels, you must get the green capsules
up to the receptical at the top...

If there is a criticism to be made it is in the difficulty: It’s a little too easy to beat. I defeated the three galaxies and bosses quite easily and found most of the challenge in trying to get through the entire game – the advanced difficulty levels don’t unlock until you’ve done this. With Roguelikes, most of the progression is found in unlocking extra items and upgrades, but you really don’t need to be playing for very long at all to have found all of these. It’s not necessarily a problem for me as I wasn’t looking for a long experience, but people who like a tough route to progress through the game might expect a little more.

All in all, Super Mutant Alien Assault is a great game that I’d happily recommend. It’s a great introduction to this sort of game, plays very well and a lot of fun. Roguelikes aren’t everybody’s preferred style of game, and this game lacks exposition, but most people will have a good time with Super Mutant Alien Assault.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Backlog Beatdown: Going on a Warhammer Quest with Warhammer Quest

 I bought Warhammer Quest when I was on a, er, “Quest” to buy all the Games Workshop licensed games – good or not – so that I could play them and make up my own mind. Interestingly, those games that I have played have rarely been “good,” in the usual sense, and Warhammer Quest is no exception – but I tend to like them anyway because of my fondness of and investment in the Games Workshop properties. Warhammer Quest is no exception to that either.

Skaven can be threatening in large numbers...

At its most basic level, Warhammer Quest is a dungeon-crawler set in the Warhammer world, in certain parts of the Empire. You have a group of four Heroes: A Human Marauder, a Dwarf Ironbreaker, a Wood Elf Waywatcher, and a Human Grey Wizard. They’re very simple roles – the Marauder is your attacking hero, the Ironbreaker fights best in bottlenecks, the Waywatcher picks off enemies with her bow, and the Grey Wizard pulls double-duty as the party’s healer and magic user. More heroes are available as DLC but it’s not an avenue I intend to explore in the short term. You travel to towns and get given a quest which almost always entails going to a dungeon (and crikey, there’s a lot of those in the Empire!) and are rewarded with experience, loot and gold. Your principle enemies are Orcs, but in certain parts of the game the Skaven make an appearance, and the Undead turn up from time to time – rarely as the main enemy though. There are thirty-one quests you can get from towns, plus each town has a dungeon in between that you can explore for more items and experience. You must at least pass these to get to the next town, so it’s always worth a look. Later in the game there are some special missions that are handed to you, and you must complete these in order to beat the game.

The screen can be spun around to odd angles.

This game was originally designed for IOS, and it shows. It controls on a point-and-click strategy game basis, though in practice there’s very little strategy to the game. You click on the enemies to attack them and they lose some health until they die; that’s about it. There’s no positioning tactics, no flanking bonuses – the nearest you come to tactical manoeuvring is deciding whether to put your two fighters at the end of a corridor to limit the enemy’s action economy, or use the Marauder to take the battle to the enemy in the room knowing that his multiple attacks mean he’ll likely drop at least some of the enemies, and he probably has enough hit points to take any reprisals. This was fine by me, as too much complexity overwhelms me after a while. It looks OK, the graphics are as good as they need to be for a game like this though all the cut-scenes are text scrolls which takes away from some of the atmosphere. The sound is pretty good as well; fantasy-level orchestral and choral scores, with some functional if predictable sound effects for the towns and weapons.

Losing your ability to act isn't much fun...

Warhammer Quest has several flaws, the main one being the Spiders – try taking these on in any significant numbers and they’ll use their webs to prevent your party from moving and slow the game right down, often forcing you to quit out of the dungeon and start again. Randomly spawning enemies every few turns are supposed to keep you alert but it happens a little too often – sometimes in the middle of an already painful fight! Some of the controls make sense on a tablet but could easily have been modified for PC. There should be a hotkey for the End Turn button at the very least, and some of the clunk could have been removed from activating abilities.

When Warhammer Quest gets it right, it can be a thrilling experience; this usually comes in the form of a reasonable but challenging timed mission. The rest of the time, it’s a solid, functional dungeon crawler. It breaks no boundaries and has little to reward you for seeing it through to the end, but if you like Warhammer or simplistic dungeon-bashing, this will keep you entertained for a few hours at least.

Final Score: 2/5: If you’re sure.

Last Week's Games: Warhammer Quest, Magic Labyrinth, Ninja Dice and Dungeon Roll

I’ve been playing Warhammer Quest again this week and finally reached the end of it, after ages of slogging through endless dungeons, hordes of spiders and timed quests which were the highlight of the game! The review will be up on Friday but I have a few additional points to make here: The ending was a bit of a let-down; it’s hard to spoil a game that has no real story to speak of, but it essentially amounts to a text scroll. Having said that, and as I mentioned in my review and some of the other blogs, when the game really goes for it – cuts your health down to the wire and forces you to win in a couple of turns or die, and puts timers on certain missions forcing you to act quickly – it can create some very tense and thrilling sections of the game which I’m glad I played! I spent a lot of time deliberating over whether to score it 2/5 or 3/5; I enjoyed it enough for it to be a three, but I always find something to like about Warhammer games and I can’t objectively say anybody else will enjoy it in the same way. In the end it came down to: “Did I enjoy it more than Regicide? No.” Therefore I gave it a two.

Snotlings aren't much of a threat but they're
always fun to splatter.

One thing I was quite pleased about when I reached the end of Warhammer Quest is its treatment of Orcs. This echoes back to something my friend Victor mentioned to me a while ago: Orcs, or Orks (their Warhammer 40K equivalent) are very often presented as hulking stupid lummoxes with nary a brain cell between them, and while that’s not necessarily the case – they tend to possess a certain amount of low cunning at the very least – it does make it very easy for writers to show them as being subjugated by a higher power. In video games, Orcs are almost always under the control of Chaos agents, or Skaven, or even Eldar depending on the game. This has the effect of limiting the Orc’s potential as a threat and knowing that the twist is coming gets old after a while. The main villain at the end of Warhammer Quest is an Orc, and I was delighted to see that for once they’ve allowed the Orcs to have a leading antagonist role. Let the Orcs be the bad guys!

Where are the walls?

Elsewhere, I tried some hobby games with Jessie. The discovery for us this week was Magic Labyrinth, the game in which you search for treasure in a maze where you can’t see the walls. This is aimed at quite a young audience, but Kirsty and I have enjoyed it well in the past, and Jessie seemed to like it too. She loves treasure hunts, so it was an easy sell! I really like this game as it is a good balance of luck and skill: The maze is constructed prior to the game, but once it starts, you find the walls via trial and error, which is where the element of skill comes into it. As you can twist the board around before the game starts, you’ve got potentially eight variations of the two mazes it gives you, and it’s given you rules for constructing your own. Also, you use a 6-sided dice for movement, which adds a random element to the game. Magic Labyrinth was easy enough for Jessie to understand, but random enough that I wasn’t necessarily at an advantage for having played it before, and in fact Jessie won the game by collecting five treasures!

I mean who wouldn't want to see
what's in the box, at least...

We also had a go with Ninja Dice; this didn’t go so well as I haven’t played it before and wasn’t able to explain to Jessie how to play (she was allured by the admittedly brilliant “box” art!) So, she quickly became bored with Ninja Dice and we moved on to an old favourite: Dungeon Roll, where she gets equal enjoyment from playing the heroes hunting for treasure as the monsters defending it. I need to modify the rules down slightly for the game to work, but she loves the theme and understands the basic mechanics. Not bad for a four-year-old!

Last Week's Games: Roleplaying Games, Warhammer Quest, Skyrim

It’s been a while since my last blog post. There have been a few reasons for this: The main one is that I’ve been involved in a theatre project for the last three weeks which has taken up a lot of my spare time. Barely a week has gone by since September where I haven’t had to adjust my working patterns to accommodate one thing or another. Also, my mental health hasn’t been at its peak over the last month. It’s nobody’s fault, nothing’s happened, but in the small amount of quiet I’ve had over the last few weeks, I’ve found it difficult to keep my mind focussed enough to find something interesting and relevant to say.

I’ve been looking at new campaign ideas for Dungeons and Dragons, with the aim of putting together a framework for a whole campaign without getting bogged down in small details. The idea is that if I ever get the chance to run it, I’d develop it one session at a time out of the framework and ideas I’m writing now. However, I’d really like to play as well so I’ve been looking in to trying to find an online group, using mainly Roll20 as a source. This hasn’t been successful; timing often gets in the way but also there are so many people trying to join games on Roll20 it often feels like applying for a job. But I’ll keep trying and we’ll see how it goes.

Sadly, I lost a friend I knew through roleplaying games the week before last. Andy from the Black Country Role-Playing Society passed away in hospital; I don’t know any more than that and I would prefer not to ask. Andy was one of the first people I was in an RPG with; he was one of the players in Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv. He was also in the first game I ran as part of the group. After that, he ran another Pathfinder game: Council of Thieves, in which I played a couple of fighters (I had to change my first one after I learned about builds!) It was a good game to be a part of, and I was able to help Andy run it by occasionally looking up a rule to resolve a dispute or explain a ruling in ways that made sense. I had to leave the game eventually when life got in the way, but Andy remained a constant and committed presence in the group and I’m sure everyone there will miss him very much. I’m glad I got to see him a few weeks ago when I had the opportunity to return to the group; you never know when it’s going to be the last time.

Imagine five, six, seven of these spiders
firing off their webs at you...

With video games, I’ve been having problems with spiders. In Warhammer Quest, I’m fighting some high-level spiders – Venomous Gigantic Spiders, or something along those lines. The problem I’ve been having with these is the way their AI is programmed. They have two ways of attacking you – bites, which can poison you, or webs, which stop you from moving. Bites are the nastier of the two moves, but they will only do this if you move close enough to attack them. If not, they’ll keep firing their webs at you, with the result that whatever is left of your party can’t move or act in any way. This slows the game down to the point where I had to quit out of the dungeons and start again, and since they can take quite a while to clear, this isn’t fun!

Apparently those things either side of its mouth
are its sexual organs. Doesn't bear thinking about...

I’ve also started playing Skyrim again, as an Argonian Two-Handed Weapon fighter. I’ve learned a few things from my time with Dark Souls and I’m a lot better equipped to take on the game now. I like how the game is developing, but I don’t like the Frostbite Spiders. Horrible things. They’re huge. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve tried to play through Skyrim and I can’t remember how far I’ve got in the game before, but my character is at level 18 now and I’m enjoying it so far so hopefully I’ll be able to see it through to the end this time.

Last Week's Games: Warhammer Quest and Escape Game: 50 Rooms 1

 I don’t know if anybody noticed, but most of the games I’ve been playing lately have been long-form RPGs, strategy games and platformers which I’m taking a fairly decent amount of time to complete 100%. One of the problems I run in to when I’m doing this blog is trying to find something new and interesting to say about the games I’ve been playing in that time. However, this week, two opportunities presented themselves, with Warhammer Quest and, er, Escape game 50 rooms 1.

Warhammer first, then. I’ve described the game in previous blogs so have a look at those if you want to know what it’s like. But I discovered a cheat. Well, that’s not true, I doubt I’ve “discovered” anything; I won’t have been the first to have found this. And it’s not even a cheat, really, it’s… not a bug either, more an exploit in the game’s programming. Here’s what it is:

"I saw a rat! Where?"

At some point during the game your party goes to Altdorf, the capital city of the Empire. Here you are given three missions against the Skaven.[1] On the second of those three missions, you’re given half of your pay at the beginning – 750 gold. You then play through the mission, where you have to drop a gas bomb in the Skaven tunnels – a thrilling battle in itself, as you only have a limited time to escape once the bomb has been set, and when I played it, it literally came down to the last available move! Immediately after completing the mission, you’re taken to a cutscene (which in this game rarely amounts to more than a text scroll, from what I’ve seen so far) where you’re paid the rest of your fee; another 750 gold. If you exit the game at that point and come back to it, the scene triggers once more and you get the 750 gold again – and you can repeat this process as many times as you like for what I assume is a potentially unlimited amount of gold! I did it twice: the first was quite by accident, as I had to leave my computer pretty quickly after finishing the mission, and the second was to check what was happening. I didn’t exploit it any more than that – I prefer not to cheat through a game – but it’s there if you need it!

The other game I played this week was Escape game 50 rooms 1, which I downloaded onto my Android phone last week and I’d beaten by the following Friday. It’s an escape room game, where you must solve puzzles in order to proceed. You find various keys for various doors, items to solve other puzzles, and the occasional number and symbol puzzle. If you find the way to open the door, you move on to the next room.

What's the connection between the
TV and the fish on the opposite wall?

Some people might think games like this are trashy timewasters, and those people aren’t necessarily wrong; it’s hardly A-Grade material. The number puzzles rarely look like the thing they’re representing. A key code panel, for example, will rarely have their numerical display in an Arial font! And some of the solutions to the puzzles are horribly obtuse. Even without that, fifty levels of essentially the same thing can get dull after a while, not that a mobile game is intended for extended play. But when it goes for it, really goes for it, Escape game works well. With most of the puzzles being confined to one room, there’s little wandering around becoming hopelessly lost and confused. The rooms you’re trying to escape from range from hotel rooms, to late 90s offices, to eerily decorated children’s rooms, to some quite frankly bizarre one-shots like ancient Egypt, a cave, and a grisly morgue. The creepy soundtrack, the abstract art, and the level design that looks ever-so-slightly off, creates the unnerving impression that you – the player character – are trying to escape from a place you don’t belong.

I’ve mentioned it here rather than giving it a full review; it’s a free download and it’s not a game I would consider I had to beat, but Escape game is a good experience that I’m pleased I’ve had.

---

[1] Rat Men, if you don’t know.

Last Week's Games: The Sexy Brutale, Necromunda, Spyro 2, Crash Bandicoot 2, Warhammer Quest, Camel Up

 I missed last week, sorry about that – certain things going on at home meant that writing blogs was the last thing I felt like doing! I’ve been playing quite a few games in the intervening time though, so here they are:

You can get this for the Switch too, apparently...

The Sexy Brutale is a heavily stylised and utterly brilliant puzzle-adventure game for the PC, whereby you play a priest (I think) at a masked ball where all the guests get murdered. You must figure out not who murdered the guests, but how – and put the mechanisms in place to prevent it from happening. It’s a brilliant idea and a good game, but the fact that I’ve had to look up a guide to get through certain parts makes me wonder whether I have the stomach for this sort of game anymore.

The Zip line provides some much-needed
mobility into the game...

I went back to Necromunda on the PS4. I wasn’t so keen on this when I first bought the game, but it’s grown on me a little bit now that I’ve figured out the key differences between this and Mordheim. It’s a lot less reliant on random number generation – it is there but it’s also a lot easier to set up high percent hit chances. In its stead, the game is a lot more about action economy; the winner of the battle will come down to who can do the most things per turn, so it’s worth getting a few kills in the isolated gangers as soon as possible.

Moneybags will teach you to swim -
for a price...

I’ve also started playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. Regular readers will remember that I enjoyed Spyro the Dragon hugely last year, and it is a pleasure to play this one. I’ve been playing it quite a lot lately and I’m not even 20% of the way through the game yet. I’ve noticed that some of the collectables – the real challenge of the Spryo games – are tied up in abilities acquired later in the game, so there’ll be some backtracking this time around. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it’s nice to see the character progress, but it’s also nice to have all your abilities unlocked at the start of the game. We’ll see how it goes!

Watch out for that plant; it'll eat you.

On those occasions where the N-Sane trilogy has been in the PS4 disc drive, I’ve been playing Crash Bandicoot 2 as well. As with Spyro, it is a game I can play when my daughter’s around, and an experience I can share with my girlfriend who likes games but isn’t interested in war! It’s fun and frustrating in equal measure; the frustration at missing daft 3D platforming sections (which kill you far more than any enemy in the game, I think I can almost guarantee that!) has to be there for the payoff, but once you do beat it, there’s an immense feeling of satisfaction.

Can you flatten them all with an Area of
Effect spell before the fight even starts?

I continued to play Warhammer Quest on the PC. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those times where I love the game because it’s Warhammer, but I’m going to have to concede that the game itself isn’t that great. It feels a lot like a Baby’s First Dungeon Crawler game, where you have characters and abilities to use, dungeons to explore, treasure to acquire and monsters to slay – all of which becomes  easy once your characters get to a certain level! But sometimes that’s all I want out of a game, so I’ll keep playing!

Yes, there's a new edition out.
But I kind of prefer this box art...

Kirsty and I also had a go at Camel Up last week, a board game about betting on racing camels. I remember playing this at the UK Games Expo in 2015 and I enjoyed it a lot more this time around when I could take the time to figure out the mechanics of the game, and what we were supposed to be doing. As a one on one game, it’s great because each of us were constantly reacting to what the other was doing. With multiple players, it would be a very different beast as there’s a higher chance that our ideal actions would go before our turn came around.

I suspect most of what I say next week will be a continuation of this, if a little more focussed! See you then.

Backlog Beatdown: Ascending to the God of Word with God of Word

About a year ago I decided I wanted to increase the speed of my typing and bought some typing games off Steam. The week before last, I decided to play one of them: God of Word, mainly because I wanted to be able to play something on my laptop without having to plug in my mouse!

What's the longest word you can make here?

God of Word is a word game where the main objective is to make a 3-7 letter word out of the given letters. This central mechanic is nothing that we haven’t been playing in our internet browsers for the last twenty years or so, but what sets this one apart is that it’s set in Ancient Greece, as a kind of paper puppet theatre set-up. The idea is that you’re a messenger – not Hermes, but probably a disciple of his – and you’re telling the story of how you journeyed from one side of the country to the other, delivering messages and battling monsters.

Each stage has a few different enemies and monsters for you to fight, and you have a set amount of time to beat them. To beat them, you must type your words in to build up your attack; you need to build a certain number of points and your letters score points based on their counterparts in Scrabble. Larger words are worth more points and do more damage. You can press tab to re-arrange the letters, and space to draw a new set of letters – but at the cost of around 10 seconds of time. It’s simple enough, and if that was all there was to it, God of Word probably wouldn’t be interesting. But the game deploys bonus tiles from time to time to offer you more incentives for using those letters: Red ones do more damage, yellow ones give you more time, blue ones give you more renown (experience, I think,) and gold ones give you, well, gold.

You won't be using that E for a minute or two...

Ah yes, gold and experience. God of Word also provides the lightest of role-playing game elements, by assigning experience points to increase your character’s attributes (that give you more time, increase your damage, etc) and at certain milestones in the game you can also buy more equipment. Better weapons do more damage and can have additional effects, and better armour gives you more time. It is necessary to do this to keep up with the way the game increases in difficulty as you progress, but it gives you some agency over which attributes to increase which builds your engagement.

I wonder what the remaining letter
could possibly be...

God of Word also manages to provide some variety in the levels. Every so often there is a “hangman” style minigame, where you have a certain number of guesses to spell a word and rescue a follower – but take too many guesses and they will die. The game has boss battles as well, which tend to work in one of two ways: In one way the game works as normal but with extra stipulations on the tiles. In the Medusa battle, for example, a letter will turn to stone if you don’t use it quickly enough, and it will take a while before you can use that letter again. The other way is a word blast, which has a couple of modes as well – either monsters or hazards come flying at you and will kill you if they reach you, or you have a certain unspecified amount of time to type a certain number of words before you die. These require some quick typing and some of them are hard – the Sirens took me a while!

This is an indie game built in the Unity engine, and while it lacks a certain amount of polish, it’s competently made. The graphics boast a distinctive art style; you either like it or you don’t, but it does what it needs to do. The sound is good as well, nothing to write home about but the effects are all in the right places and the music sounds epic enough (if a little anachronistic for the time period it depicts, but hey, most things are!)

God of Word won’t change the world, but it’s a fun game to pick up and play – and get lost in.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a Look

Last Week's Games: James Pond 2: Codename Robocod, Necromunda: Underhive Wars

 I’ve got quite a bit to say about the games I’ve been playing this week. I don’t know how much of it is going to make sense; I’m not very well today. But we’ll see how I get on:

The first thing I should say is last Friday I reached the end of the main campaign of Not Tonight; you can read my review here. I’ve enjoyed it, and it hasn’t outstayed its welcome so I might give the extra part of the game called One Love a go as well, but I haven’t got much more to say at this point.

I also reached the end of God of Word. As a game that I installed onto my laptop so that I’d have a game on there I could play without necessarily having to plug in my mouse, it certainly served its purpose, and I managed to spend quite a long time playing it over the last few weeks! I’m hopefully going to get a review out on Friday so I’m not going to say too much about it now, but it was a good time.

Back in the day when pickups increased your
score and didn't have to make any sense...

It was my birthday last Wednesday and my daughter Jessie bought me a game for the Nintendo Switch: James Pond 2: Codename Robocod. The James Pond series never really broke out of the fourth console generation (Megadrive / Super Nintendo) and hasn’t had the longevity of some of its contemporaries, but they’re still fun to play. A couple of my friends at school had Codename: Robocod, so I’ve played it a few times before, but never beaten it. It’s a side-scrolling platform game where you traverse colourful locations in Santa’s workshop, fighting your way through traps, hostile creatures and rescuing hostages. Interestingly, of all the James Pond games, it was Codename: Robocod that was ported and re-made onto several consoles after its generation, with some differences including level layout, music, and hostages. I have a vague memory of the hostages in the old versions of the game being penguins; these days they are Santa’s Elves – I suspect mainly because the penguins in the original game were a product placement for the McVities Penguin Bars, and the sponsorship deals have long since expired. The game was altered several times over the generations it was released on, so I don’t really know which version I’m playing – it could be that there was a new version entirely for the Switch!

I bet she's a sight for sore eyes...

Finally, on the PlayStation 4 I’ve been playing Necromunda: Underhive Wars. I’d been looking forward to this game for a long time and is one of the very few games in years I have bought close to release. I’d rather have got it on PC to tell you the truth, but for some reason it’s not designed to work on Windows 8.1 (My PC specs are fine in most other respects, but I wasn’t going to waste my money risking a purchase when it says on the Steam webpage it will only work on Windows 10.) So, I bought it on the PS4. Now, some of you will know that Mordheim: City of the Damned is one of my favourite games, and Necromunda looked like it was going to work much the same way but with guns. And it does – but there are other things going on as well. The campaign – the small amount of it I’ve played, anyway – is far more narrative than Mordheim, with each mission I’ve played so far supporting a plot point. I haven’t tried making my own gang yet, as the story mode drops you in with the Escher gang and presumably allows you to explore the other gangs (Goliaths and Orlocks) as you proceed. I’m not sure whether I like this or not – part of the fun of Mordheim for me was taking your warband through its own story and progression and having the occasional mission to do in between to move the plot along. I appear to have less agency over how the Necromunda gangs develop, but we’ll see how it goes. It may take some getting used to but I’m sure I’ll find the fun in it; it’s a GW game and I usually like those by default!